I came up with an algorithm inspired by bzip's algorithm of generating all substrings and then sorting them. I tried yours on a list of 20 strings of 1000 chars, and it ran in 153 seconds. Mine ran in 0.67 seconds, yielding the same results. 30 strings of 3000 chars runs in 20.3 seconds on mine; scaling up from there starts to get painful, but I would guess the OP's requirement of 300 strings of 3000 chars would run in under an hour, if it had plenty of memory (there will be 900,000 strings averaging 1500 chars in length).